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SXSW: What's out there?

South by Southwest Festival, the arena where technologies meets the interactive, film and music industries, ended last week in Austin. Many conferences, happenings and announcements joined up with the trends and topics we discussed at {dive} last year. We are happy to share our impressions caught at the event as well as a selection of interesting articles. Enjoy!

As The World Of VR Descends On SXSW, Here Are Six Must-See Experiences

The South By Southwest conference, which kicks off in Austin this Friday, has long straddled the worlds of technology, film, and music. In other words: It may be the perfect showcase for the latest and greatest in virtual reality. This year, the fest is launching its first dedicated VR section with the new Virtual Cinema slate of the SXSW Film Festival. Here are six highlights that attendees won't want to miss. One of the great promises of VR is ability to create shared virtual environments, where disparate individuals are beamed into a single digital space. In Life of Us, users who are VR-ing from different physical rooms get to see themselves (and the person they are partnered with) evolve from primordial protozoa to modern man and beyond (apparently the future of evolution looks a lot like a Daft Punk video). Read more

Saturday at SXSW: Hooray for health

[…] This year's SXSW's health event is a revelation. Six years ago, the health track didn't exist; last year, it was relegated to a hotel more than a few steps away from the Austin Convention Center. The content sang, but attendees found themselves outside the heart of the SXSW action. It felt like a conference unto itself. This year, however, there has been a degree of enthusiasm usually associated with Marvel fanboys. On Saturday, lines snaked outside the two conference rooms devoted to health panels. One panel, “Patients-Centric Healthcare: The Future of Health,” seemed a particularly big draw and was attended by a wide range of health-adjacent professionals: On the badges I non-stealthily and thus obnoxiously observed, there were more quote-unquote mainstream tech companies and analytics/data players than organizations that typically dominate pharma and health klatches. Read more

SXSW Food: Taste-testing a meatless burger, s’mores yogurt bar

I’ve been in the thick of SXSW for the past few days, soaking up lots of interesting stuff in the panels and trying a few cool new foodstuffs. To be honest, there aren’t quite as many food activations at South by Southwest this year, even though the food programming itself has grown into a healthy track over at the Driskill Hotel. (The panels filling up early without a one in/one out policy, however, isn’t going over so well with attendees, which is another story for another day.) At the Create & Cultivate day party over on East Cesar Chavez today, I had two fun food experiences. The first was trying a meatless burger from Impossible Foods, a San Francisco-based company that sells a hamburger-like product that you can shape and cook into anything you’d make with ground beef. Impossible was giving away sliders with caramelized onions that tasted surprisingly like the real thing, but with that signature fake meat aftertaste. That hazy meat analog taste is common in all of these products, and the Impossible meat substitute had less of it than others I’ve tried. Read more

HBO Brings Hit Series and Interactive Fan Experience to SXSW 2017

South by Southwest® (SXSW®) Conference and Festivals attendees will have a chance to test their knowledge of all things HBO® at this year's festival, thanks to an interactive experience that challenges fans to escape from three HBO-themed experiences. HBO: The Escape is an immersive escape-the-room style experience featuring rooms themed to different HBO shows (Silicon Valley, VEEP and Game of Thrones). Participants solve a series of clues in each room to unlock the door to the following room and complete all three. In each room, teams will have the opportunity to complete a challenge, locate the door and escape to the next room. Once they've made their way through all three rooms, each team will have a chance to take their photo on the Iron Throne, to purchase merchandise from their favorite HBO shows from the online HBO Shop, and to be among the first to sample the brand new GAME OF THRONES wines, created in partnership between Vintage Wine Estates and HBO Global Licensing. Read more

New Mobile Music Experience Introduced at SXSW

Optinvent's ORA-X: World’s 1st Augmented Reality Headphone Optinvent presented the ORA-X at the South By South West conference. Targeting music lovers on the go, the ORA-X is a brand new category, an Android powered smart AR headphone. The ORA-X blends a stylish headphone with high quality audio sound, a standalone Android computer, and a disruptive see-through retinal projection technology. The ORA-X enables a brand new mobile entertainment experience: not only hearing music, but ‘seeing music.’ The ORA-X will allow never before seen mobile entertainment applications such as watching music videos, mobile gaming, AR, and much more. It will take headphones to the next level! See video here